“Naw, nothing far as I could see, but I was in here, so I couldn’t see how he fell.”
I crouched close to Cameron, doing my best to ignore my headache, and waited to see if his reflexes kicked in. Live dinner and all. I counted to ten, but he still didn’t move.
“I’m going to roll him,” I told Nate, and heaved Cameron’s lifeless body over onto its back. His eyes were open but not focused. I squeezed his wrist. Not even an eye flicker. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess he was just another corpse.
“K, is he, like…dead?”
I frowned at Nate’s face in the compact.
“Oh, come on, you know what I mean,” he said.
“Honestly? I don’t know. I’ve never seen a zombie do this. In the last twenty-four hours I’ve seen a hell of a lot I’d never seen before, and your guess is as good as mine.”
Unfortunately, there was only one way to check if Cameron was still a zombie. I shook my head and aimed the amputation knife between two of his ribs. My hands were shaking so much I had to anchor the knife tip in the skin to make sure it wouldn’t veer off. I drew in three even breaths, braced myself and tapped the barrier.
Gideon wasn’t kidding. The Otherside wasn’t cold—it burned.
“K? What the hell is going on with you?”
I couldn’t spare the energy to reply as I tried to keep the knife steady. Once I had enough Otherside, I forced my eyes open. It stung, like getting an eyeful of sand and bright sun all at once.
As always, his anchors showed up first, followed by the finer lines. Finally, the clockwork bindings appeared.
“Shit.”
“K? For fuck’s sake, I can’t see anything. Talk to me,” Nate said in a panicked voice.
All six of the gears were rotating, tugging at the anchor lines like tiny fishing reels. I peered at the lines more closely, wondering if I should chance it and try to stop one….It’d be so easy, just keep pulling Otherside until I had a globe, then reach out and stop one.
“K, watch it!” Nate’s voice pierced the fog filling my head.
I shook off the Otherside, glad to be rid of the burning sensation, and glanced at him in the mirror.
“K, what the hell’s wrong with you? Don’t look at me, look at Cameron!”
Cameron was sitting up, his green eyes focused on me. Even before his mouth curled into a snarl, I knew from his blank, white-green stare that Cameron wasn’t in there anymore.
He reached for the hand still holding the knife.
I yelped and tried to scramble away, tripping over my bathrobe. Cameron grabbed my wrist and squeezed. Do you have any idea how much pressure a human hand can exert? Especially when there isn’t anybody driving to register the damage he might be causing to his own hand or me.
“I’m really sorry about this, Cameron,” I said, and drove the knife towards his heart. He jerked away and the blade slid off his rib cage and into his abdomen.
Shit, I’d have to stab him again.
But before I could use the blade again, Cameron’s eyes went wide and the vacant zombie stare, well, vacated. “Goddamnit, that hurt!” he yelled.
“Cameron?” His grip on my wrist loosened and I put distance between us.
He glanced down at the amputating knife sticking out of his flesh, then back at me and back at the knife. “You stabbed me? With a knife?”
“Yeah, ah, sorry about that.”
He stared at the antique wooden handle sticking out of him, then reached around to feel his back. He brought back blood on his fingers. He frowned at me. “It went all the way through.” His expression shifted from shock to anger. “Do you have any idea how much that hurts?”
“I had to. You were zombieing out. Besides, it didn’t do any real damage.”
His frown deepened and he held up his bloodstained fingers.
I made a face. “All right, so it pierced your kidney, maybe your liver, neither of which you’re using. We’ll get some more brains in you and it’ll heal up in no time.” I crouched down to examine the wound. Narrow, barely any blood…I grabbed the handle and pulled fast.
“Ow!” Cameron screamed.
I wrapped a towel around the entrance and exit wounds. Not that there was much blood flow, but I didn’t need it dripping all over the apartment.
“You could have warned me,” Cameron said, wincing as he laid a hand on his abdomen.
His skin had taken on a clammy grey appearance and his eyes were whiter. I tried one of his fingernails and almost peeled it right off. He was degrading fast. Again. Whether it was a direct result of the gears turning or just a side effect of passing out, I couldn’t be sure. I also didn’t want the blood pooling in his abdomen. I made him stand and led him into the kitchen. I dumped the knife in a bucket under the sink with bleach and washed my hands before handing another brain packet to him. “Just get it down—we don’t have time to cook it. Cameron, when did you last eat?”
“Ten,” he said between bites.
I checked the garbage and there was the empty packet. It was just past midnight now. Two packets in less than three hours.
Just what the hell was I supposed to do with a broken zombie I had no way of fixing?
My phone rang and I managed to get it out of my jacket by the front door before whoever was trying to get a hold of me hung up. It was Lee.
“Kincaid?”
I didn’t let her get further. “Who the hell is Gideon Lawrence?”
The silence on the other end lasted five whole seconds. “I’m not sure where you heard that name—”
“He introduced himself after he crashed my seance and tried to strangle me. Twice.”
She didn’t respond. I took that as a cue to keep going. “Did you know he can set his own mirrors and bypass sage smoke?”
“Kincaid, I think you should come see me right now.”
“Seriously? That’s your answer? You’ve got to do better than that.”
“There’s been another zombie murder. This time in the underground city.”
CHAPTER 15
DEAD AND BURIED
Lee slid my second double whisky sour across the bar. She’d changed the colour scheme of the bar’s paper lanterns again. They were now a pale pink that reminded me of cherry blossoms, and decorated with red script. At least she hadn’t decided to repaint the chairs and walls. That smell with this headache?
I swirled the ice in my glass. I wasn’t convinced double whisky sours were the best cure for Otherside hangovers, but Lee seemed to think they worked. I took another sip.
“Better?” she asked.
“Lee, I don’t think anything short of a coma or a bullet will make this headache any better.”
Cameron snorted. He was sitting beside me, still working on the first concoction Lee had brought him, one that looked oddly like a margarita on the rocks, complete with green food colouring and what smelled like lime juice. There was no way I was leaving him alone at my apartment, even with Nate standing watch.
We’d both needed a drink after seeing the body. Lee had left the zombie where she’d found her, face down in a shallow pool of rainwater in the runoff sewer I’d used to enter the city just yesterday. The similarities between this zombie’s death and Marjorie’s were uncanny, from the Otherside shrapnel strewn around the tunnel to the traces of ancient Arabic symbols. But the body showed not a trace of trauma anywhere; she’d either known the person who attacked her or thought she had nothing to fear.
“Any idea what time she was killed, Lee?”
She nodded. “After midnight. She was collecting shells, seaweed and whatever trace of sand she could find on the low tide last night, but no one noticed she was missing until past midnight.”
Both sand and seaweed were in high demand in the underground, the dried seaweed for various crafts and the sand to help curb dampness and erosion. Sand was in such short supply on the west coast, a lot of zombies had taken to collecting shells and crushing them in old jerry-rigged grist mills.
�
�Did anyone see her down by the water?”
Lee shook her head.
I took a second sip of my whisky sour and winced. “Lee, her Otherside bindings were ripped right off of her.”
Lee kept her eyes on the glasses lining the bar, maybe checking for dust. It was pointless: everything was always covered in a layer of dust. A hazard of the underground.
“I think someone is trying to make a Jinn, Lee.”
She stepped away from me and began preparing her version of a Bellini for a table of four zombies, pouring the first pink-coloured layer into each of the funnelled glasses.
“Come on, Lee, why the hell ask me to come if you don’t want my opinion? You can see Otherside shrapnel just as well as I can.”
But Lee had already loaded the tray of glasses and was heading for the table.
“Goddamnit, Lee, get back here.”
“Want to know what I think?” Cameron said.
I glanced at him as he took a careful sip from the margarita concoction and grimaced.
“I think you’re asking a lot of questions she really doesn’t want to answer.”
“No, if she really didn’t want to answer, she’d have kicked us out by now. She’ll answer when she’s good and ready.”
A few minutes later, she ducked back behind the bar. “Are you certain it was not a poltergeist that attacked you?”
“My ghost problem can wait. Aaron’s got a murdered practitioner he thinks is linked to Marjorie’s death, and with the one tonight that makes three. Tell me what you know about the Jinn and those Arabic symbols—”
Lee hissed as she raised her hand to silence me. “I asked you a question, Kincaid. Please show me some patience and respect.” Her scars shifted like shadows. “Are you certain your attacker was not a poltergeist?”
I stuffed down my own anger. “No, it wasn’t a poltergeist. Nowhere near angry or crazy enough.”
She pursed her lips. “With respect, Kincaid, the ghost did attack you, unprovoked, twice.”
“Oh, he’s evil, all right. But he had a plan. Poltergeists never have a plan; they just throw things around until someone gets hurt.”
She nodded. “I have never had the misfortune to meet Gideon Lawrence, but I am familiar with his name and reputation. He is a trader of sorts, mostly of information. He is very powerful and dangerous.”
I pointed to the bruises around my neck. “I could have told you that.”
She frowned. “Gideon is the ghost of a powerful sorcerer.”
“Sorcerer? Don’t you mean practitioner?”
Lee shook her head. “Practitioners such as yourself use Otherside to communicate with the dead. Sorcery is an old practice that involves manipulating Otherside.”
“Like protective barriers? Or designing the locks that protect the city?”
Lee nodded. “Those are simple manipulations, little more than channelling Otherside into inscriptions, like setting a mirror or binding a zombie. A sorcerer’s spells break the natural order, warping Otherside into something that no longer belongs in this realm or the other.”
I’d always been taught that the defining feature of Otherside is that it doesn’t belong on the living side of the barrier. That is the trick of working with it: the Otherside is always fighting you, pulling back, hence the need for inscriptions and bindings. If you could warp it, make it stop fighting…
As if reading my thoughts, Lee added, “Sorcery carries much more risk than simple channelling. When things do not go as planned, the consequences are dire. Once Otherside has been warped, the barrier no longer recognizes it. When a sorcerer’s spell fails, the energy becomes trapped between this world and the next, and it is very unstable.”
“So what happens? It explodes?”
Lee pursed her lips, considering. “I suppose it does. When Otherside is released from the confines of a sorcerer’s spell, it searches for somewhere to lodge itself. Anything can happen, from starting a fire to striking someone dead.”
“To tearing inscriptions right off a zombie,” I added. “That’s what you think happened with the murders, don’t you? Someone’s trying to make a Jinn and the spells are backfiring.”
She nodded. “My brother always suspected that Jinn bindings required a mixture of Otherside and sorcery to work. Which is why I ask about the sorcerer’s ghost.”
Yet she’d withheld the information…I stopped myself. No sense getting upset about Lee’s cagey nature at this point. “You think Gideon is behind the murders?”
She shook her head. “No. A sorcerer’s ghost retains only a fraction of his power and spells. These inscriptions would be well beyond Gideon’s capabilities. But he may have traded the information to a human practitioner, maybe knowing their intentions or maybe not.”
Gideon was in the middle of an argument with Max over payment. “Max isn’t involved in the murders, Lee, he can’t be,” I protested.
She nodded. “I agree that Maximillian is not behind this. I’m merely pointing out the coincidence of the sorcerer’s ghost appearing in Seattle and the murders. It would be wise to question Gideon about the Jinn if and when the opportunity presents itself.”
“I thought you wanted me to stay the hell out of it?”
“As you so eloquently put it, with three victims the circumstances have changed.”
Lee ducked into her office and returned carrying two large volumes, one under each arm. She dropped them on the bar and tapped the leather cover of the larger, scrapbook-sized book. “I believe these are the references you wished to consult.”
I carefully flipped it open. The first yellowed page was a collection of newspaper clippings, glued down and wrapped in Cellophane. The earliest was dated 1888 and was a short report of the deaths of a dozen or so crib girls, struck by a sudden illness. The article was little more than a warning: “Stay away! Sick people!” Crib girls were about the lowest form of prostitute there was, Chinese slaves who lived and died in wooden shacks, or cribs, down by the docks, in easy reach of passing sailors. Death by disease wasn’t an uncommon fate.
Beside the report were handwritten notes, in both Chinese and English, listing dates and numbers. Below those were four detailed drawings of female torsos, with cut marks and black Xs over the organs, each diagram marked with a number that corresponded to a note above. Shit, these were autopsy reports. The crib girls hadn’t died of disease—they’d been murdered, and horribly so. Three binding symbols were noted in the margin.
“These are your brother’s notes, aren’t they?”
Lee nodded. “But please continue. You will see why I did not immediately consider these relevant.”
I flipped to the next set of clippings, spread over two pages, decorated with newsworthy headlines of murder. The first was dated May 23 of the same year, right after the crib girls’ deaths had been reported. It detailed the murder of a seamstress. In the Seattle of that era, a seamstress was often also a prostitute. According to the tax rolls, there were more seamstresses living in Seattle than on the rest of the west coast combined, San Francisco excluded.
I flipped to the next page and was faced with anatomical diagrams and notes detailing where each girl had been found, with an X marking where each of the bodies had been mutilated. I checked the Xs against the original victims. Each had been mutilated differently and had had different parts excised: tongue, eyes, heart, kidneys. The list read like a bad horror film. More symbols had been annotated; some were Arabic, and others I recognized as Celtic runes and voodoo symbols. All of them were used in creating zombies.
Lee turned the page to the next set of clippings. The headline WHITECHAPEL COPYCAT stared up at me in stark black print from the otherwise yellowed page. The Jack the Ripper Whitechapel murders had been committed over almost three years, spanning April 1888 to February 1891. Though the killings in London had just started, the news had had plenty of time to reach America. In my world, even now, people loved to speculate as to the nature of the killings, the most popular theory being zombie exp
erimentation using fresh volunteers.
This was the first article in the book that was accompanied by a photograph, a flattering black-and-white headshot of a pretty woman with classic blond corkscrew curls and a porcelain-doll face. The caption read “Anna Bell, June 18, 1870–June 18, 1888.” Her eighteenth birthday. Her murder diverged from the pattern of the crib girls’ deaths in that it did not occur at the docks but where Anna had lived.
“Either the killer knew her or that was one hell of a coincidence,” I said to Lee. Then I noticed the story mentioned Louise Graham, the high-end madam whom Lee had worked for, and at the same time too. “You knew her?” I said, pointing to the portrait of Anna Bell.
“We worked together, briefly. She had been in Seattle two years longer than I and had done well on her own, and even better once Madame Graham recruited her. We were not friends, but we tolerated each other as well as could be expected. Before Madame Louise opened her brothel, Anna Bell had run a lucrative side business out of the Oriental Hotel as a body dealer.”
I let out a low whistle. Back in Seattle’s early days, the university was always looking for cadavers for the med students to dissect. They were hard to come by, so the faculty offered ten dollars a cadaver—a lot of money back then. The university quickly had to add a couple of rules: no knife marks, ligature marks or signs of strangulation. The odd man or woman with no family, no friends, just passing through Seattle, would end up drowned under the pier after a night of hard drinking; the university rules said nothing about drowning. Turn-of-the-century Seattle had attracted a damnable mix of creative folk.
Lee leaned over and pointed to a paragraph three-quarters of the way down the article, her white nail with painted pink cherry blossoms striking the Cellophane with a soft tap.
“The reporters and police were used to bar brawls and muggings. They were at a loss when it came to dealing with a sophisticated killer. For example, they never noticed that all the women were killed on Thursday nights, almost always by the docks.”
I flipped back to double-check. Sure enough, every girl had died on a Thursday night. “Lou did, though, didn’t he?”
The Voodoo Killings Page 20
